Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) is a reliability tool that is used to ensure the inherent designed reliability of a process or piece of equipment through the understanding and discovery of equipment functions, functional failures, failure modes and failure effects. RCM uses a structured decision process to determine a task to eliminate, detect, reduce the frequency of occurrence, or reduce the consequence of each specific failure mode. In doing so, the output of the RCM analysis becomes a complete maintenance strategy that is designed to ensure and sustain the inherent designed reliability of the asset.